Pablo's GiftAnimal Stories from All-Creatures.org

FROM

Bleary-eyed, ragged, exhausted, Pablo thought he was dreaming when he saw
the black rooster standing in front of the coop. And when he heard that high
pitched purr, that sweet trill that was the rooster's name for him, it
brought him to his knees, not because the call was uttered in anger or
recrimination but because -- unbearably -- it was voiced in joy, in
friendship, in forgiveness, and in trust. There he was, this brave bird,
standing in front of him like a small earthly miracle, like a prophet of
life.

Pablo called Peaceful Prairie Sanctuary, asked "What
is vegan?" and then listened with an open mind, free of prejudice and defensiveness. We
offered abundant information, resources, immediate help and support as well
as the assurance of future help and support during his transition to
veganism. Before he hung up, he added in a soft voice, as if talking to
himself: "I think I've always been a vegan at heart, but now I will be vegan
in real life. I've always loved animals but I never knew I could live
without hurting them for food and other things. Now I know. Thank you."

"What is vegan?", he asked after a long pause.

He called the sanctuary hoping to find a home for the chickens he had
been ordered to dump in the woods. The birds were deemed "too old for the
pot", too "stupid" to keep as pets, and too "ugly" to use as yard
decoration, so the ranch owner decided to use them as coyote bait instead.

Pablo...named for his rescuer, Pablo

It was not something Pablo wanted to do but he feared that openly
refusing to harm the chickens would not only jeopardize his already tenuous
job as a handyman at the ranch where he worked in exchange for a room to
crash in and a meager pay to live on, but it would also prevent him from
finding a way to protect the birds. So he kept putting off the grim task,
using every excuse he could think of to buy time for the condemned chickens,
while he secretly searched for a safe home for them.

But time was running out and, with no internet access, no family or
friends to call on for help, and under explicit threat of being fired, he
found himself forced to appease his increasingly irate boss with a show of
partial compliance: he resolved to take only one chicken into the woods that
night, promising he would return in the morning to catch and dispatch the
others.

And that's how it all began, one frigid winter night when Pablo was
forced to decide which of the six innocents would die. Under his boss'
watchful eyes, he took the one bird who was easiest to catch -- the black
rooster who was the least afraid, the one who was the most confident and
talkative of the six, the one who was always patrolling the edge of the
huddle that his family, frightened and suspicious of humans, often clustered
in for protection. The bird who had taken a special interest in Pablo,
keeping him company when he worked around the coop, allowing him closer to
his family than anyone else, and offering a constant stream of comments and
observations in sounds whose meaning the man did not understand but whose
substance he recognized as trust.

The rooster did not move when Pablo entered the yard. He just stood
there, as if waiting for a friend, and he didn't protest when the man picked
him up, held him, tucked him in his jacket and carried him away. He was not
afraid, this fragile bird, he trusted the gentle human whose proximity he
had welcomed in the past, and whom he always greeted with a high pitched
purr, a unique sound reserved just for Pablo: his "name" for this man.

The walk from the coop to the truck was the longest 30 yards of Pablo's
life. He didn't want to think of what he was about to do, he didn't want to
feel his own sadness, or imagine the despair that would soon engulf the
doomed rooster, he just wanted to get the grim task over with as quickly as
possible, hoping that the pain of harming this defenseless soul would be
brief, that the memory of his dark deed would fade soon after the job was
done, and that the "sacrifice" of one bird would buy him time to save the
others.

He drove the rooster far into the woods, set him on frozen ground and
left him there. He didn't linger as night fell, didn't look back, didn't
want to think of the next hours, or perhaps days, in the hapless bird's
life. He just hurried back to his truck and sped back to the ranch as if
fleeing a nightmare.

But the nightmare followed him home. Back in his room, Pablo couldn't
stop thinking about the rooster. He was worried, he was sad, he was ashamed.
The bird's eyes haunted him, what he had done to this fellow being haunted
him. He imagined the bird shivering in the bitter cold, frozen in fear,
blind and helpless in the utter darkness, screaming in terror as powerful
jaws crushed his bones, as he strained his broken wings in a last, desperate
effort to fly away, as his bloody feathers covered the ground like the
leaves of a strange tree.

Everything Pablo had refused to see and feel as he took the rooster to
his death earlier that evening, was now rushing back into his mind with
haunting, unrelenting precision. He remembered every detail of the rooster's
being. The warmth of the bird's chest against his, the living current of his
breath as he huddled inside his jacket, the brave drum of his heart, the
deep pools of his eyes, the unbearable gift of his trust. By midnight, Pablo
jumped out of bed, grabbed a warm jacket and a flashlight, and drove back to
the woods. Even if the bird was going to be killed at the ranch, Pablo could
not, would not, be the agent of his death.

He searched everywhere, looked up and around every tree, reached under the
thorny crown of every bush and shrub in the area where he had abandoned the
bird, called out in soft whistles and gentle words, and then waited silently
for the faintest stir, the faintest sign of life. But there was no response.
At dawn, Pablo abandoned the search and drove back to the work site claiming
he was there to "finish the job" but in reality planning to gather the
remaining chickens and hide them somewhere until he could find a refuge for
them (where? for how long? He did not know, but he did know he could not
abandon them).

Bleary-eyed, ragged, exhausted, Pablo thought he was dreaming when he saw
the black rooster standing in front of the coop. And when he heard that high
pitched purr, that sweet trill that was the rooster's name for him, it
brought him to his knees, not because the call was uttered in anger or
recrimination but because -- unbearably -- it was voiced in joy, in
friendship, in forgiveness, and in trust. There he was, this brave bird,
standing in front of him like a small earthly miracle, like a prophet of
life.

It was at that very moment that a ranch visitor Pablo had never seen
before stopped by to chat and, in the course of their casual conversation,
she mentioned Peaceful Prairie Sanctuary.

Pablo called the sanctuary right away and left a long message explaining
the situation in tones of great urgency. When we finally connected, we
agreed to take the birds and bring them to safety. We talked at length. He
lives from paycheck to paycheck (when and if he can find work), his bright
mind was never given the academic stimulation it craved, he didn't have a
home to call his own, he scraped a living working at remote sites that
offered a room to crash in and a menial pay. He is a genuinely kind, strong,
and fair-minded person.

When the details of rescuing and transporting the chickens were finally
in place, he had only one question: "What is vegan?" He explained that he
had first heard the word on our answering machine and was wondering what it
meant. In conversation, we conveyed that being vegan means living one's life
without depriving others of theirs. It means not only having the
understanding that harming others is wrong, but acting on that understanding
by refusing to harm ALL animals, not just the ones we meet face to face, but
the ones we never get to see, the invisible ones who are bred and butchered
for products none of us needs.

He listened with an open mind, free of prejudice and defensiveness. We
offered abundant information, resources, immediate help and support as well
as the assurance of future help and support during his transition to
veganism. Before he hung up, he added in a soft voice, as if talking to
himself: "I think I've always been a vegan at heart, but now I will be vegan
in real life. I've always loved animals but I never knew I could live
without hurting them for food and other things. Now I know. Thank you."

Pablo has since expressed a desire to rescue as many of the animals
captive at the ranch as possible. He has read all of the literature we
provided and is hungry for more. He said that the day he saw the rooster --
now named Pablo in honor of the man who saved his life and who, in the
process, dared to reclaim his own -- when he saw Pablo standing in front of
the coop after having miraculously survived the freezing cold and the
all-engulfing darkness, it was like seeing a road sign that pointed the way
out of the woods, out of the cold, out of the darkness. THIS WAY, it said.
And he followed.

The six chickens are now safe, loved, and free to fulfill their lives at
Peaceful Prairie Sanctuary. They still huddle in their little family clutch,
and they still keep to themselves in the corner of the yard they claimed as
their own. And Pablo rooster is still protecting them from everyone -- from
visiting sparrows and fellow chickens, to wondering sheep, goats, pigs,
cows, and llamas. But they are a very happy family, a very harmonious group,
these three "broiler" hens and their three "laying breed" roosters. They are
gentle, and patient with one another, and the hens struggle to nurture
everyone in their family despite the burden of living in bodies that are
killing them. ["Broiler" chickens are bred to grow morbidly large, morbidly
fast in order to reach "slaughter weight" by the age of 6 weeks. As a
result, they are doomed to suffer crippling diseases of the heart, lungs,
and bones.]

Pablo, the man, is free now, too. Free from prejudice and denial, free
from the soul-killing practice of violence. Free to heal his own heart, to
act on his own deeply held values of justice and compassion, free to follow
the road back to his own true humanity, a road that started with one simple
act of conscience. A conscience is all it takes to be vegan, after all.
Doing the right thing takes no special skills, no special resources, no
special privileges or support. Just a conscience and the will to act on it.

If living ethically is important to you, please remember that there is
nothing humane about “humane” animal farming, just as there is nothing
ethical or defensible about consuming its products. When confronted with the
fundamental injustice inherent in all animal agriculture—a system that is
predicated on inflicting massive, intentional and unnecessary suffering and
death on billions of sentient individuals—the only ethical response is to
strive to end it, by becoming vegan, not to regulate it by supporting
“improved” methods of producing dairy, eggs, meat, wool, leather, silk,
honey, and other animal products. For more information, please read The
Humane Farming Myth. Live vegan and educate others to do the same.

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